Warren Bennis Quotes

Whoever wants to be a leader should educate himself before educating others

People need to be in charge of their development plan. They need to seek out their sponsors and their mentors and be very strategic.

Leadership is a journey - you never arrive.

We spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do. We don't spend enough time teaching leaders what to stop. Half the leaders I have met don't need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop

Few leaders are born. We learn to be leaders. We learn by working with other people and working through our philosophy.

A great coach can lead you to a place where you don't need him any more.

My best investment, as cliched as this sounds, is the money I've spent developing myself, via books, workshops and coaching. Leadership begins within, and to have a better career, start by building a better you.

The very exercise of leadership fosters capacity for it.

I vividly remember a conversation I had many years ago in 1974, which marked a turning point in my leadership journey. I was sitting at a Holiday Inn with my friend, Kurt Campmeyer, when he asked me if I had a personal growth plan. I didn't. In fact, I didn't even know you were supposed to have one.

The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.

More than once in the history of Whole Foods Market, the company was unable to collectively evolve until I myself was able to evolve - in other words, I was holding the company back. My personal growth enabled the company to evolve.

I don't plan in terms of career ambitions. The only career ambition I have is to work with people who are going to bring you up and elevate your performance. They'll let you know things that you didn't know already and bring you places that you might not have gotten to otherwise.

No matter how good you think you are as a leader, my goodness, the people around you will have all kinds of ideas for how you can get better. So for me, the most fundamental thing about leadership is to have the humility to continue to get feedback and to try to get better - because your job is to try to help everybody else get better.

I get to learn and teach something new everyday.

I would assert that highly effective leaders are made more than they're born. Every leader I know who's been highly effective has worked hard at it, and they've been students of it. The more you're a student of leadership, the more you figure out what works for you and the more effective you're going to be.

All coaching is, is taking a player where he can't take himself.

I was accorded the opportunity to learn by failing - albeit at the cost of a few honourable teachers' sanity - and now I realise what a rare and incredible luxury that is.

It's important for a leader to hear about his blind spots on a regular basis so working on them is periodically top of mind.

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.

I'm not a great manager; I try to be a great leader. And for me, that's been going through a process of not how to be a great CEO but how to be a great Evan, and that's really been the challenge.

It's been a wild journey for me. I'm trying to take what I've learned and help teach, inspire, and lead the way for the next women. And that does begin with the cliche of loving yourself.

Over my NFL career, I've had five head coaches who have helped me become better at my craft and have helped me become a better human being: Jim Mora, Tony Dungy, Jim Caldwell, John Fox, Gary Kubiak.

What you learn from my life is, first of all, that anybody can be a leader. You can be a leader. I wasn't born that way - I developed it, I worked at it. And also that the grassroots can organize and take on all the powers that be and defeat them. That is the lesson.

I read books by other coaches all the time.

I'm sure Mourinho will make me a better player and a better person.